More Trump misdeeds to add to the pile

By Tara Donovan (Corcoran Gallery)

     For a habitual liar, former president Donald Trump can be amazingly candid. He will, occasionally, interrupt his countless falsehoods with astounding moments of candor. Such as when he said, with spot-on accuracy, at a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa early in 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”
     Yes, it is. Incredible. And commenting on him nonstop since June, of 2015, when he descended that escalator in the gaudy salmon glitz of Trump Tower, to pronounce immigrant Mexicans as criminals and rapists, I have yet to get my head around the missing piece that Trump provides for his supporters.
     Permission, I suppose, to be as vile and perpetually injured as they obviously want to be. A TV star, descending from the Mount Olympus of gaudy wealth and tabloid celebrity, to bestow blanket permission on anyone who will pledge their unwavering loyalty, to assure lumpen red state America that they are the true victims of history, that every life that is not straight, white, Christian is an offense against them, one they can battle with all their energy, guiltless and unrepentant.
     Thus his being judged Tuesday by a New York jury as having defamed and sexually molested writer E. Jean Carroll — an assault, which, in another moment of absolute honesty, Trump copped to, on tape, as doing habitually to women who stumbled into his grasp — is added to his being impeached, twice, not to forget his continued delusional denial of an American presidential election. Plus his fomenting of an insurrection against the Capitol that led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers — if you can ignore that, what is a civil case that goes against him? Toss it onto the enormous steaming pile of Trump’s previous wrongdoings.
     As I’ve said many times before, once you get into the habit of ignoring reality, the specifics of the reality being ignored hardly matter. Reality itself has been discarded by millions of Americans as being a mere fraud, a practice so imbedded now in the Republican Party that Trump could vanish tomorrow — no sign of that happening, alas — and his acolytes and imitators would proceed along his blazed path.

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In defense of King Charles III

      There isn't as much room in the newspaper for letters as there used to be. So with this reader being disappointed that the Sun-Times wouldn't print his letter about how off-base he felt I was about King Charles, and with a yawning void labeled "Tuesday" sitting in front of me, waiting to be filled, I thought I would serve as a middle man and bring the two together. 

    Rob Hirsh writes:

     Good morning Neil. It is actually rare that I disagree with you; call it respect for your work that I feel duty bound to let you know when I do. Herewith my response to your column of last week, which I submitted to the paper but doesn’t appear will be published: Neil Steinberg’s disdain of the British monarchy in general and King Charles in particular is abundantly clear from his opening salvo that “there is something squinty and inbred about the man—his parents were third cousins, remember.”
     Wow, talk about a cheap shot—not to mention simply wrong. Third cousins share roughly 0.78% DNA, which hardly puts them in like company with the “Deliverance”-style sub-basics he suggests. As for the disastrous marriage between Charles and Diana, which Steinberg lays squarely at the feet of Charles, it is not that simple; in fact it was a union doomed from the start for reasons not all his fault. Most simply (although there was certainly other criteria), the non-virginal 33-year-old Camilla Parker Bowles — the woman the 32-year-old heir to the throne truly loved — was unsuitable to become the future Queen Consort of England. The 20-year-old, pretty Diana Spencer, virginal indeed, with perhaps as much blue-blood as Charles, was, in a word: perfect. The world got the fairy-tale marriage with glittery trappings it wanted; Charles and Diana, not so much.
     Yes, Charles cheated on his wife early on, and while that is certainly not to be defended, it wasn’t as if he’d snuck around looking for fresh action because he was randy, but because the institution he’d been born into with many of its cockamamie rules insisted he be miserable rather than marry his true soul mate. And let’s not forget that Diana cheated also; and while it always be conjecture whether she’d have done so had her husband not done so first, it certainly made it easier to escape, in whatever fashion she could, a marriage that seemed to be loveless from the get-go.
     Summation: had these two mismatched people not been pressured into a union neither seemed to truly want, Diana Spencer, who loved children, might have gone on to live a quiet life as a British school teacher, or perhaps owner of an antiques shop in the Cotswolds—and be very much alive.

The Ballad of Sherman Wu

     When Hsiu Huang Wu was a little boy in China, he and his older brother would dig holes in their backyard, trying to reach America.
     He would get here, eventually, in a big way — featured in Life magazine, lauded in song by Pete Seeger. But mostly forgotten today, which is why, this being Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, I thought I would share the story.
     His father, K.C. Wu, was mayor of Shanghai after World War II, where he hosted visiting Chicago Tribune’s Robert McCormick on one of his round-the-world jaunts. An improbable friendship developed between the famously xenophobic publisher and the Chinese official.
     When it came time for Wu’s two daughters to go to college, McCormick suggested Northwestern, and the two teens lived with him while preparing for school. McCormick even threw Eileen Wu’s wedding at Cantigny and gave her away, standing in for the father of the bride, who had become governor of Formosa — now Taiwan.
     After falling out with the nationalists, the elder Wu and his wife Edith fled to America, settling in the Georgian Hotel at Hinman and Davis in Evanston. Only his younger son, Hsiu Huang, remained behind. Gov. Wu accused Chiang Kai Shek of holding the boy hostage.
     With McCormick’s help, the teen finally came here and began attending Evanston Township High School, where teachers so badly mangled pronunciation of “Hsiu Huang” that he decided to change his first name to “Sherman,” inspired by Sherman Avenue.
     In the fall of 1956, Wu began his freshman year at Northwestern and went through the fraternity rush process. Two frats offered him membership, Acacia and Psi Upsilon. He accepted Psi U.

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Bruce McCall's enormous world

  

     "It's like working in a Bruce McCall illustration," thought the master of the obscure reference, waiting for a tour of the new Sun-Times space at the Old Post Office to begin last October.         
     For those who weren't raised on the National Lampoon in the 1970s, McCall, a Canadian-born artist who died Friday, built his oeuvre upon the inherent humor of the enormous — vast interior spaces, stupidly huge 1950s cars, Brobdingnagian ocean liners. He created "The Battling Buses of World War II," a parody of the bomber adventure worship popular at the time. 

     McCall moved up from the Lampoon to the empyrean of The New Yorker, where his covers are masterpieces of the marriage of the monstrous and the detailed.  

     They reward careful examination. As does the Old Post Office. The lobby is gigantic, the hallways disappearing to the horizon. But upstairs, you look at your feet and the little square tiles are perfect. The walls are regularly graced with either historic mail photographs, or animal shots, all artful black and white. Nothing is slipshod. Someone spent a fortune. I was utterly charmed with the lux renovation of what once seemed a permanent white elephant. A corporate Xanadu, with countless grottos, niches, pool tables, bars, coffee shops, a health club, a rooftop deck. EGD glimpsed it when I visited Ferrara candy in April, but the tour was a closer look. Or maybe I just realized I get to come here whenever I like.

     "Will I?" I wondered. It seems a bit ass-backward for there to be this place where there's a great health club and rooftop chaise lounges and bars with pool tables and bocce ball and, oh yes, a fairly spartan room filled with computers where you can also go and work. Last time I visited, a few weeks back, I stayed for an hour, and was utterly alone. I can't imagine this arrangement lasting very long.

     There were upsides. As much as I think synergy is a myth made up by real estate folks trying to sell radioactive downtown office space, the fact remains that, on my tour, I got to talking to a new WBEZ colleague I'd never met, and within five minutes we were planning newspaper events and brainstorming possible ideas.

     Which came to absolutely nothing, as such bursts tend to do. But for a moment it seemed like progress was being made.

     Speaking of which. After I conjured up McCall, I tried to interview him. I'd read his memoir, "Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada," and found it both well-done and disappointing. Well-done in that it had moments that resonated — he finds a crumple package of American cigarettes on the side of the road, and picks it up, yearning toward the boundless, appealing, frenetic country that seems just down the road.  

McCall's 83rd New Yorker cover

     And disappointing in that he never got to the National Lampoon part of his life, never mind The New Yorker part. It was like reading a book about Michelangelo as a child, before he picked up a chisel. Only after I reached out to McCall, last October, did I realize he had written a second memoir, "How Did I Get Here?" Didn't do my due diligence. So I read that while going back and forth with his people. He had people, which struck me as unusual for an elderly artist, and I sent them questions. 

     Reading the second memoir took the air out of my desire to talk to McCall. He'd worked on "Saturday Night Live" at its heyday. He drew more than 80 New Yorker covers. And yet ... it did not make him happy. Pretty miserable in fact. Bruce McCall reminded me that success can be overrated. Excellence and achievement can be no more sources of satisfaction than mediocrity and oblivion are. It's all in the interpretation. Or rather, to flip open "Paradise Lost" and quote John Milton: “The mind is its own place and, in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.”

     These are the questions I sent to Bruce McCall last fall and he never answered. Looking at them now, and given his death, half a year away, I'm not surprised he didn't bother. Still, I think they're good questions, and I would have liked to hear his replies:

1. Throughout history, enormous buildings and interior spaces were associated with grandeur, or the divine. You discovered big also can be funny. How did that come about? Why are huge things funny? It seems to me you are mocking the unrestrained ambitions of the past, the desire to have too much of everything. Are you?

2. It's been years since I read "Thin Ice," but the image of you gazing in longing at that American cigarette pack at the side of the road has stayed with me. To what degree is your artistic perspective influenced by being Canadian?

3. I noticed that even though you said that Parkinson's has "ruined" your ability to draw and paint two years ago, you have had several covers printed — are these covers that were already in the New Yorker's pipeline, or do you manage to continue despite the disease? Is this a struggle you'd feel comfortable describing? Are there more on their way? Steig's style changed markedly as he aged. Have you considered factoring the deprecations of Parkinson's into future art, the way some artists have?

4. If you can't create artwork yourself, have you considered sharing ideas with other artists and having them render your concept?

5. How many covers have you done? Were you serious about being disappointed about not reaching William Steig's record. Many New York cartoonists can't manage a single cover — you've had about 80. That must be very satisfying. What makes a great cover? Any suggestions for those trying to sell their first?

6. We are in something of a golden age of appreciating illustration. Who were your heroes growing up? Who do you most admire now?

7. Have you made provisions for your work? Do you see it being donated to a museum, or is it all sold?

8. Are you familiar with AI image generators like DALL-E? They're garbage now, but hold out the potential to cut into the already shrinking market for illustration. Is that a cause of concern?

Works in progress: Monica Eng

      Writing with a co-author is an entirely new gear for a writer. At least it was for me — whereas I usually write based on my own gut, now there was a second, exterior voice, one I was obligated to listen to, understand, respect. 

     Which wasn't a problem when I was writing "Out of the Wreck I Rise" with Sara Bader, who inevitably was right, or at least had a point, particularly when dialing back my more flowery prose. I remember her saying, "You're competing with the poetry."

     It was fun, educational, productive.

      So when I approached my former Sun-Times colleague, Monica Eng about her writing something here about her new book, "Made in Chicago: Stories Behind 30 Great Hometown Bites," I asked her to address how she came to collaborate with her co-author.

    The only thing better than eating great local food is reading about it, and this book seems a natural summer read for those of us bouncing around the suddenly-warm city, eating stuff. Monica and her co-author will be at the Highland Park Public Library Monday, talking about their book. Take it away, Monica:

     After years of reporting on Chicago-invented dishes, I was having lunch with a food historian friend who suggested I collect a bunch of their origin stories in a book. The University of Illinois Press was launching a 3 Fields imprint on Midwest culture and he thought it would be natural fit.
     I was barely keeping up as a mom, radio journalist and podcaster — much less a person who regularly washes her hair. So it seemed nuts to add a book deadline to the chaos. But at a book party in late 2018, I was talking to my pal and fellow food writer, David Hammond, about the difficulty of the project and he agreed to take on half the writing. We cooked up a book proposal and finally signed a contract right before the pandemic hit. I don’t think we saw each other’s faces in person for four years after that party.

     When it came to figuring out the 30 foods to feature we used these rules: All the dishes (or twists on them) had to be invented in Chicago, served in more than one place and tell an interesting story. To meet our 18 month deadline, I worked during vacations, on weekends and at night, mostly wishing I’d never agreed to do it. But like most of my big babies, this one has left me with nothing but pride as the memories of labor pain fade away. The book designers did a nice job of making this perfect for the your bike basket and glove compartment, so you can whip it out anywhere in the city to learn that a tasty bite and story are right around the corner.
      But more than just making an eating guide, I wanted to highlight these inventors, almost all of who were recent arrivals from other countries or the South. Our hot dog toppings tell the story of early 20th Century migration to Maxwell Street. The Pizza Puff comes from Assyrian immigrants from Iran crafted hot dog carts from baby buggies and manufactured corn roll tamales. Rib tips hit menus because Chicago barbecue masters from Mississippi didn’t want to waste a gnarly bit of the rib that many threw away. And the Akutagawa omelet represents Japanese-Americans in Wrigleyville who held onto small part of their culture even after the U.S. government told them to leave it behind.
    Beyond the happy stories, though, I found a bigger depressing story of persistent cultural segregation. Few South Siders have ever eaten the Akutagawa or gam pong gi, and fewer North Siders have tried Sweet Steaks, Jim Shoes or Pizza Puffs covered in mild sauce. My naïve hope, though, is that this book might change that a little — that these stories might intrigue readers to the point where they bust out of their own neighborhoods to try something new across town that gives them a little better understanding of the people who share their city.

Don’t tread on my gas stove!

     Will the Russians nuke us? Or high-tension power lines fry our brains? Could we be poisoned by the water? By fluoride, or lead? Are we being gulled by subliminal advertising? Blinded by sitting too close to color television? Or by computer screens? Cooked by microwave ovens? Will cellphones give us brain cancer? Are we being crushed by overpopulation — too many kids. No, bankrupted by aging demographics — not enough kids. A new ice age, no, global warming. Africanized killer bees, on the move north. Would the airbag in my Honda slit my carotid artery instead of saving me? Will AI — Artificial Intelligence — start churning out content in one corner of the internet while consuming it in another, shutting humans out of the loop entirely and somehow destroying the world?
     Honestly, by the time gas stoves were raised as a peril, I’d had a lifetime of ooo-scary threats that proved illusionary, an endless car alarm blare of empty warnings, so many that I’ve become immune. News of any danger without the immediacy of “you’re bleeding” is safely ignored.
     Seriously. Last summer, a colleague phoned to say his Chicago cop friend was concerned about people on Twitter threatening to kill me. I chewed on this a moment, then replied, “Are they on their way here, now, to get me?” They weren’t. So I went back to gardening.
     So naturally, the alarm about gas stoves left me unmoved. This week, when the state of New York banned gas stoves in new construction, I didn’t feel either the planet nor Empire State children are being saved. I grew up with an electric stove, burning myself more than once on coils that were off but still raise-a-blister hot. Supposedly the new electric stoves are better, but gas stoves are what pros cook on — you’d no sooner go into the kitchen in a fine restaurant and find an electric stove than you’d expect to see them emptying cans of Progresso into a big pot for the soup d’jour.

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Flashback 2010: Overshadowed by his skyscrapers

Willis Tower (Photo by: Mike Innocenzi, aka @pantagapher. Used with permission)

     Here's a koan for you:

     Q: How can a man be busy writing, yet have nothing written?

     A: When he's busy writing something else, and has nothing for his daily blog.

     That's okay. Because I noticed that Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of the topping off of the Sears, of late Willis, Tower. That sent me wandering back, looking at my various takes on what for years was the world's tallest building. I like the one below, because it's a relic from slough after the 2008 recession, when half-built buildings dotted downtown and it seemed that the city had gone to hell. A reminder, as we struggle through our current civic woes: we've been through this before. Notice my use of "Trumpish" as a pejorative in 2010 — ahead of the curve.

     Shouldn't architects be better known, considering what they do? I'm not talking about Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Sure, they're famous and probably always will be.
     I'm talking about subsequent architects. When Bruce Graham died last week, and I read in his obituary that he had designed both the Willis (nee Sears) Tower AND the John Hancock Center, my first thought — and perhaps yours, too — was: "Never heard of the guy."
     Of course, 1973 — when the Willis Tower opened — was a long time ago, and the Hancock was completed even earlier, when I was in third grade. Graham could have been borne in triumph down State Street on a sedan chair over scatterings of rose petals and given the key to the city.
     But I doubt it.
     How is it that any promising Cubs rookie receives more enduring fame than someone who created not one, but two, Chicago landmarks? We have a better chance of being aware of a French artist like Jean Dubuffet, because of his god-awful Snoopy-in-a-blender sculpture jammed into the too-small plaza of the Thompson Center, than we are of the guy who designed the center itself, Helmut Jahn (of course, that might be a favor to him, depending on your opinion of the Thompson Center — post-modern masterpiece or horrific white elephant, take your pick).
     Perhaps the obscurity of architects is their own fault — they're always winging off to Bahrain to design something new. Were I Bruce Graham, I'd have spent at least one day a year hanging around on the sidewalk in front of the Sears Tower with a big "Ask Me About My Building" button, cadging conversations with passersby. But I am not an architect.

    Work in progress

     

     Spring peeked over the fence Thursday afternoon, and I celebrated by walking a cigar along Wacker Drive, admiring the Chicago River.
     At Clark, I paused to study the stalled construction across the street. "Waterview Tower — A 90-story elite residence," the battered signboard proclaimed.
     "No," I corrected, "Waterview Tower — a 26-story unsightly concrete shell."
     It isn't nice to smirk at somebody else's financial ruin — this forlorn, decaying edifice blew through someone's millions.
     The truth is, we're all cooking in the same pot. But they put it up, and now we have to watch it crumble. And there's something about that sign that invites contempt, something about its exultant, Trumpish phrases of enticement — "World-class lifestyle." What was that exactly? Gold-plated faucets?
     Bristles of rusty rebar poke up where construction left off, like shoots from a dying plant. I crossed the street and gazed through the fence. An overturned safety barrel. A port-o-john. "No HIRING ON JOB SITE" read a blue sign. No kidding; no hiring anywhere. Construction on Waterview stopped almost two years ago, and nobody expects it to start up again.
     We're not used to this. If you go to a Third World country, residents start building structures as soon as they scrape together a truckload of cinder blocks, halt while they earn capital for another truckload, then continue. The streets are dotted with buildings in every stage of completion, many going straight from new construction to abandoned ruin without ever being a finished building.
     Something for us to look forward to.
     The Waterview condos are advertised as ranging from "$562,000 to $2,316,000." You have to marvel at the specificity of that second sum -- not $2 million, not $2.3 million, but $2,316,000. That's so exact, as if it represented actual worth, the result of complex calculations. When it was just a guess, and a wrong one. The people doing this kind of thing — those who plunged the world into its current financial crisis — loved to pretend they knew precisely what they were doing. But they didn't.
     I was at the corner of Franklin and Lake when I noticed a man — 60ish, holding a scrap of paper and looking puzzled. I sensed that if I looked him in the eye, he would ask directions. I did, and he did.
     "Where is Wacker Drive?" he asked.
     Savoring the moment, I slowly raised both arms, straight out and perpendicular to each other, the right pointing north up Franklin Street, the left pointing west down Lake.
     "It's right there," I said, and let him gaze at me in bewilderment for a moment before explaining
     "Wacker Drive curves," I said. "There's a North, South, East and West Wacker. Where on Wacker are you looking for?"
     "Three Three Three West Wacker," he said. "A green, granite building."
     Now, it was my turn to be bewildered — 333 W. Wacker was directly in front of us. We were practically standing on its steps.
     "It's right there," I said, pointing to the number of the door. To my surprise, he argued.
     "No," he said. "That's 633 W. Wacker." Sure enough, there was some kind of scuffed area by that first "3" which, from where we were standing, made it look like a "6." We went closer and peered at the numerals while I pointed out that it was really a "3." He thanked me and went into the building.
     I walked away thinking, "Just goes to show the importance of details." Here you have one of the most attractive, beloved iconic, buildings in the city -- designed by Kohn Pederson Fox Associates, by the way — and one little flaw, some corrosion around a numeral, is enough to render the building practically invisible to someone standing in front of it. Architects matter, but so do maintenance men, and one of them needs to get out there with a rag and some solvent.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 14, 2010

Editor's note: In 2011, the owners conducted a study of the shell of Waterview Tower, at 111 W. Wacker, and decided it was salvageable. The project was scaled back from 92 to 59 stories, and completed in 2016. It's now dubbed OneEleven.